A Boston College sports blog capturing the highs and lows of being a BC fan living 1,000 miles from Chestnut Hill.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Fenway news and Ryan diss

BC and the Red Sox sports marketing arm the Fenway Sports Group announced an extension of their current agreement. The new deal continues the relationship for another 12 years and beefs up BC’s account team. No one has disclosed the amount of revenue generated by the new deal but I imagine both parties must be pretty excited to agree to something of this length. In my interview with Steve Novak I sent him a question trying to gauge how the BC fund money compared to other sources of revenue. Obviously he did not share (not that I blame him…there are benefits of being a private university). For this to make sense for the Red Sox I would guess that they are generating multi-millions. And for BC you would have to assume they are generating more money than they did independently. So assume it is very good for everyone involved.

In other news…

Reader Steve E. and a few people on the message boards were pissed when Matt Ryan was lumped in with the rest of the ACC QBs and dismissed as nothing special by ESPN's Pat Forde. This is consistent with Ryan not getting much preseason Heisman attention from any of the major sites or publications. I am not too upset. At this point it doesn’t matter. The Heisman has morphed into an MVP award for the No. 1 team, so it is a long shot for Matty. I also think he'll prove enough this season and make all ACC again and has a very good shot at being Second or Third team All America.

2 comments:

I am of the opinion that it is BC Sports Marketing and Fenway Sports Marketing's fault as to why Matt Ryan is not mentioned as a Heisman candidate.

The marketing for this school needs a major makeover. Efforts are completely stale. The folks at marketing still use the bowl streak as their crutch for marketing BC football. They don't use the fact that Matt Ryan was last year's ACC Player of the Year. Rather then mentioning BC's new enthusiastic head coach (and using his ingenius marketing buzz word he uses for recruiting "BC Guy"), they focus on their hackneyed past, including the bowl streak that hardcore fans could care less about, and which casual fans (who should be the main target of BC Sports Marketing) know is completely ridiculous and pointless considering the plethora of bowls that are played each season and the subpar teams that BC has beaten in each bowl.

If BC is to ever go "Big Time," it will need a major overhaul in the sports marketing department. Until that happens, expect interest in BC Athletics around the Bosoton area to remain tepid.

I love Matt Ryan, but he is not one of the 5 best quarterbacks in the nation and he still has a lot to prove (which I believe he will this season). For example, great quarterbacks make key plays at key times. They also mount game winning drives with consistency.

Last year, you could partially attribute all 3 losses due to Matt Ryan not making key plays at key moments. At NC State, he muffled a snap near the red zone and in both the Wake and Miami games, he threw INT's in the final drive. To be fair to Matt, he started out brilliantly with key drives against Clemson and BYU in OT and the late season losses all came when he was playing on a broken foot. But in the late season conference games, he faltered. Also, I feel last year's BC offense did not put up enough points to help the phenomenal defense. Ryan cannot shoulder all of the blame for this, but I feel great quarterbacks consistently lead teams to more than 21 points in a game. Until Ryan leads BC to game-winning drives in conference play, he will probably not be mentioned in the Heisman chase.